Trends in Recovering Dissolved Boron from Wastewater and Seawater

Abstract

A lot of researches have been carried out on the recovery of resources from the seawater all over the world. The boron concentration in seawater is low about at 4.5ppm, but considering the volume of seawater, the total weight of dissolved boron amounts to about 5.4 trillion tons. The boron is an essential resource in about 300 kinds of industries. Korea has imported all of the boron and spent more than 700 billion won each year. In this article, we introduce the domestic and international research trends and technologies for removing or recovering the boron from wastewater and seawater. Most of the researches have been conducted to remove the boron from the desalination process, and to recover the boron mainly from wastewater and brine. The technique for the recovery of the dissolved boron includes the ion exchange, which is the most representative, the adsorption membrane filtration (AMF), solvent extraction, and so on.